]]>The Jewish celebration of Purim features reading aloud the complex and heroic account in the Book of Esther of Esther’s willingness to risk her life to save ancient Jews from annihilation by the King of Persia. Traditionally, among Orthodox Jews, the story was read aloud by men, but now Orthodox women are leading Purim services, too.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2015/02/27/womens-purim/22426/feed/1Esther,leadership,Orthodox,Purim,tradition,WomenMore and more Orthodox Jewish women are celebrating Purim by taking the lead in reading aloud to other women the heroic story of a queen and her people in the Book of Esther.More and more Orthodox Jewish women are celebrating Purim by taking the lead in reading aloud to other women the heroic story of a queen and her people in the Book of Esther.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno5:00 Simon Schama Extended Interviewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-simon-schama-extended-interview/22500/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-simon-schama-extended-interview/22500/#commentsFri, 21 Mar 2014 21:09:59 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=22500More →

]]>In a five-part series beginning on PBS stations next week, noted historian Simon Schama explores 3,000 years of Jewish history. What sustained Jews through anti-Semitism and persecution? In the TV series and in a companion book also entitled “The Story of the Jews” Schama says, “The problem of the Jews was that they were a nation without a home.”

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-simon-schama-extended-interview/22500/feed/1history,Judaism,persecution,Simon Schama,tradition"We are a very noisy, verbalizing, speechifying language animal, and I love that. But we walk around as so many millions of talking books.""We are a very noisy, verbalizing, speechifying language animal, and I love that. But we walk around as so many millions of talking books."Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno12:48 Rabbi Benjamin Elton Extended Interviewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-rabbi-benjamin-elton-extended-interview/22503/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-rabbi-benjamin-elton-extended-interview/22503/#commentsFri, 21 Mar 2014 21:06:50 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=22503More →

]]>Rabbi Benjamin Elton discusses the progression of tradition in Orthodox Judaism in permitting Jewish women to lead the reading of the story of Queen Esther’s heroism on her people’s behalf for other women on Purim.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-rabbi-benjamin-elton-extended-interview/22503/feed/0benjamin elton,Book of Esther,Esther,leadership,Orthodox,Purim,rabbi,tradition,Women"In the last couple of generations, we’ve seen a great increase in Jewish learning amongst women. Women have said, 'Well, we are also obliged in the commandment. We can take a leading role.'""In the last couple of generations, we’ve seen a great increase in Jewish learning amongst women. Women have said, 'Well, we are also obliged in the commandment. We can take a leading role.'"Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno4:02 Pilgrimage Through Holy Weekhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/03/30/march-26-2010-pilgrimage-through-holy-week/5979/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/03/30/march-26-2010-pilgrimage-through-holy-week/5979/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2012 18:35:57 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=5979More →

From the fourth century until today, Christians have created things to do together, rituals, in order to experience for themselves the great simplicity of redemption. These rituals are meant to recur, they are the stones of an archway which, once built, is there to use, to go in and out by prayer and so to find pasture. We do not want to be rebuilding a different-shaped arch, however entrancing, but to use what we have, what we are used to, in order to enter into the real business of prayer. So the ceremonies of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, are there to be used, and this is a physical matter, a use of the body, so that all of ourselves will know. Intellectual apprehension of truth is all very well, and indeed for some it is enough; but for most of us, we live in a half-light, neither awake nor asleep, wanting to understand but not quite able to think it through; we need to be there to act it out, to participate. This is in no way an alternative or lesser kind of theologizing; by both ways we come to the central theme of redemption, the flesh-taking of Christ in which he returns to the Father and takes us unto the dynamic life of the Trinity which is the ultimate procession, and it is by physical processions that we can learn to become part of that reality.

The last days of Holy Week provide a simple way of allowing the body, the flesh, to learn theological truth by doing and being in earthly processions. Palm Sunday’s procession is about how to do the basic human thing — to walk, to take one step, just to be able to do the next step, and to remain with that doing, not seeing a much quicker way to get there by a bus, a train, a ship, a plane, which are quicker than our feet; we are always dashing through in order to be somewhere else, and when we are there then we think we will begin. But the procession is a slow, corporate event, the pace set by the weakest and slowest. Like growing, a procession is something done for its own sake, and in doing it we are becoming what we are not, going by a way we do not understand, for a purpose that is God’s, not ours, in ways that are too simple for our sight. We will never of course be ready on earth for the full “procession” which is the dynamism of the life of love which is the Trinity, since we are broken human beings, with limited sight; but given our consent, God can lead us by the flesh he created, to understand and apprehend the image of God which he placed within us. All that is needed is to give a minute assent, however impatient and grudging, and then just to do it. A procession can be seen as a sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In the same way that we read through the letter of the Scriptures to the inner truth, so we understand more by walking than we know; it is the work and gift of God.

Meditation upon the processions of Holy Week is rightly undertaken at its commencement. In the early church, for the first three days of Holy Week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the custom was to have only plain readings from Scripture; later, what was read each day were the separate accounts of the Passion. Then as now, these were days of stillness and silence when all were to be prepared, emptied, turned towards the Saviour’s great work. After the signs we gave ourselves during Lent of being ready to become empty by giving things up and therefore more free, now that desire will be put to the test. There is nothing now to be done or thought. It is the end of Lent, the pause before the great mystery of Redemption. In this pause, it is possible to reflect on these three processions, on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter night, as ways into the great procession which is the life of Trinity, and this is not just for ourselves here and now. First we walk with so many others from the past, joined with them by our present actions. We receive life from the hands of the dead to live it out ourselves and pass it on to others, and that is true tradition. We are walking with our friends. And second, we do not do this for ourselves only, but for the whole of creation; insofar as one small portion of humanity which is us assents to the love of God, so the whole of creation becomes part of redeeming work.

Read an excerpt from “In the Company of Christ: A Pilgrimage through Holy Week” by Benedicta Ward. She is a historian of Christian spirituality at the University of Oxford./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/03/thumb-holyweek.jpg

View a gallery of selected details from an anthology of 36 psalms, “I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms,” by Hebrew manuscript artist Debra Band (Jewish Publication Society, 2007). In her introduction to the illuminations she writes: “Just as psalms occupy a central role in Jewish liturgy and many home and life-cycle rituals, so are they valued in the other Abrahamic religions. Islam holds the Psalms of David, known in that tradition as Zabur, among its sacred texts, although it does not incorporate them into liturgy. Psalms have formed the core of Christian prayer since its inception. Jesus, as a Jewish rabbi, quoted Psalms liberally in his teachings, and the earliest Church Fathers founded Christian prayer on Psalms. Monastic movements recite the full Book of Psalms in regular cycles, and the medieval traditions of psalters, breviaries, and books of hours, and indeed Gregorian chant, are based on readings of the Psalms….the Psalms remained key texts for Luther and Calvin and became the basis of Protestant prayer and source material for hymns. A fervent and well-read Lutheran, Bach’s Passion settings are largely based on texts from Psalms. The very first book published in the American colonies was The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, known commonly as The Bay Psalm Book and produced in Massachusetts in 1640.”

BOB ABERNETHY, host: The holiest time in the Jewish calendar begins next Wednesday evening (September 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur ten days later. For Jews around the world, it’s a period of introspection and atonement. During both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, congregants hear the sounding of the ram’s horn or shofar. Our producer, Noelle Serper, visited the Glickman family near Buffalo, New York, for whom sounding the Shofar has been a three-generation tradition.

NOELLE SERPER, producer: When the congregation gathers at Temple Beth Am to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, they will experience what Jews have for centuries—the blast of the shofar as a kind of wake-up call.

It’s a reminder. It sends a shiver, that we can be better than we are, and how do we approach God but with that strange cry in our ear, and perhaps on our lip, and we come before God and we say who are we? What are we? Remember what we could be, and help us along.

The Glickmans, for three generations, have been our shofar blowers here in this congregation.

SERPER: Marshall Glickman became Temple Beth Am’s Ba’al Tekiah, or the one who sounds the shofar, over 40 years ago.

MARLENE GLICKMAN (Widow of Marshall Glickman): They used to time him, because he could hold it so long, and they couldn’t believe it. He felt a commitment to his religion and a commitment to his God and to his congregation. He just felt like it was a gift that he was giving to the community and that he was the person through God giving that gift. At his funeral, there were over 800 people.

JOE GLICKMAN (Son of Marshall Glickman): When the funeral was over, when they put him in the ground, we blew the shofar, and it was quite nice. It was very lovely. The notes were great, and I don’t know that I’ve ever played the notes as well as we did at that point. But at that point I guess people said, “Wow, you should keep on playing,” and “Why don’t you and your son play in echo?”

RABBI TANENBAUM: Tekiah…

JOE GLICKMAN: It just gives the room a deeper vibrating, vibrational sound that echoes through one’s heart, one’s chest.

RABBI TANENBAUM: Shevarim Teruah…

JOE GLICKMAN: They listen to the shofar, and they can close their eyes and say, “This is the same sound I heard 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.” These are the same prayers, the same music, and they feel a oneness with times gone by.

STEVE GLICKMAN (Marshall Glickman’s grandson): Blowing the shofar is a family tradition that my grandfather started when he was 15, and I started when I was 14. It just makes me happy to continue that tradition.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/09/thumb01-shofar.jpgThe blast of the shofar during the High Holy Days, says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, “sends a shiver” and reminds us “we can be better than we are.”

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/09/03/september-3-2010-shofar-family/6941/feed/1Holidays,Jewish,Jewish High Holidays,Rosh Hashanah,Shofar,tradition,Yom KippurThe blast of the shofar during the High Holy Days, says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, "sends a shiver. We can be better than we are."The blast of the shofar during the High Holy Days, says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, "sends a shiver. We can be better than we are."Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno3:06Illuminated Psalmshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/07/02/illuminated-psalms/5861/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/07/02/illuminated-psalms/5861/#commentsFri, 02 Jul 2010 13:55:23 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=5861More →

]]>View a gallery of selected details from an anthology of 36 psalms, “I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms,” by Hebrew manuscript artist Debra Band (Jewish Publication Society, 2007). In her introduction to the illuminations she writes: “Just as psalms occupy a central role in Jewish liturgy and many home and life-cycle rituals, so are they valued in the other Abrahamic religions. Islam holds the Psalms of David, known in that tradition as Zabur, among its sacred texts, although it does not incorporate them into liturgy. Psalms have formed the core of Christian prayer since its inception. Jesus, as a Jewish rabbi, quoted Psalms liberally in his teachings, and the earliest Church Fathers founded Christian prayer on Psalms. Monastic movements recite the full Book of Psalms in regular cycles, and the medieval traditions of psalters, breviaries, and books of hours, and indeed Gregorian chant, are based on readings of the Psalms….the Psalms remained key texts for Luther and Calvin and became the basis of Protestant prayer and source material for hymns. A fervent and well-read Lutheran, Bach’s Passion settings are largely based on texts from Psalms. The very first book published in the American colonies was The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, known commonly as The Bay Psalm Book and produced in Massachusetts in 1640.”
View a gallery of images illuminating the psalms by Hebrew manuscript artist Debra Band./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/03/thumb2-illuminatedpsalms.jpg

]]>RABBI TAMARA MILLER: The word mezuzah means doorpost. So in the Book of Deuteronomy, in the sixth chapter, it does say that we should put on our doorposts, on our gates of our homes, this mezuzah.

Most often the mezuzah will have the letter Shin. It stands for one of God’s names, which is Shaddai, which has been translated as “Almighty.”

Inside is the holy text that comes from the Book of Deuteronomy. We call it the Shema, which means “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one.” And then it continues to say what we should do, which is to love your Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your spirit. The text is always the same. It has to be on parchment.

In order for it to be authentic, it has to be written by a holy person for whom this is their holy work. And so that mezuzah, what’s written on that parchment is a way of saying God, the universe, the holy is protecting us as we go in and outside of our homes.

Chanukat Ha’Bayit means dedication. Chanukat means “a dedication” of the Bayit, “of the home.” It’s important that people do witness your new home and be part of the ceremony.

The mezuzah is placed on the right-hand side of the doorpost, about a third of the way down, and in the homes of Ashkenazic Jews, Jews from Eastern Europe, they would have it slanting inside, towards the open of the door, towards the home. The Sephardic Jews that come from North Africa, they put it straight up and down.

If you only have one mezuzah, it should be placed outside. Then you can put a mezuzah on every door in your house, outside every room. The only place you’re not supposed to put it on is the bathroom.

An object such as the mezuzah is so accessible to people. You don’t have to go into the synagogue. You just have to go into your house, which is something that you do on a daily basis. I love the fact that it’s affixed, and it’s not movable, because that’s like God is our rock—always there, always affixed to our hearts.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: India has long lured spiritual tourists from the West, as a place to escape the modern world. But over the past two decades, India itself has tightly embraced that modern world, at least in urban areas where the large and growing middle-class lives. The Gupta family has seen much prosperity in recent years. They enjoy most of life’s material conveniences in their New Delhi home. As is common in Hindu households, this one has an altar. Each day Bhavana Gupta places a puja or food offering to Lord Krishna, one of Hinduism’s most widely worshipped deities. The daily worship habits and rituals have been passed down for generations in this family. For Bhavana and Deepak Gupta, who runs a photo supplies business, these have changed little.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): Before anything else, I pray. Then I go every day to the temple before eating anything. I first go there, pray over there. Then I have breakfast.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): I have the same routine. I get ready. Then go to temple. We pray to be shielded from all of life’s problems—for marriages, for children, in business decisions. Everything we do is after invoking the blessings.

DE SAM LAZARO: There are regular prayers in the home, shared with their three children and his mother, in India’s joint family tradition. The Guptas, however, do worry about the growing influences on their children from the ubiquitous advertising on billboards, on the Internet, on television, influences that they say are already altering the traditionally rigid and hierarchical parent-child relationship.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): They don’t listen to their parents. A few years ago, children used to fear their parents.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): They more treat us like friends now. They argue with us.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): All the designer labels are coming to India. We used to get slippers for 20 rupees. Now they want 600-rupee brand-name ones.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s exactly that kind of angst that may be driving the market for a media antidote: religious-based satellite television channels. Pramod Joshi leads one of several such enterprises, called Aastha, which means faith or devotion.

PRAMOD JOSHI (CEO, Aastha TV): The mission of the Aastha channel is to take the Indian culture, the Indian heritage, the social and spiritual culture of India to the world.

DE SAM LAZARO: Aastha provides round-the-clock programming, a variety of preachers from Hinduism and closely related South Asian traditions like Sikhism and Jainism. They invoke the ancient scriptures, conduct meditation and yoga and programs reminiscent of evangelical Protestant tent revivals. Most of these gurus pay to get on the channel.

(speaking to Pramod Joshi): How many people do you think you reach?

JOSHI: I think in India we reach to at least 250 million viewers.

DE SAM LAZARO: Two hundred and fifty million viewers?

JOSHI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: The huge market has lured advertisers, and Aastha’s stock has performed well on the Bombay exchange. As editors and producers package Aastha’s content, the goal is to distinguish it from the commercial Hollywood- and Bollywood-inspired fare on other channels.

KISHORE PUTHRAN (General Manager, Aastha TV): There are programs that show a lot of divorce or extramarital affairs and things that way. But that’s actually not a fact in India, so our network, on the contrary, is actually showing you, okay, this is India. This is the religion, these are our values, and this is how we live.

DE SAM LAZARO: India is a tradition-bound, generally conservative society, but exactly what religion is has never really been clearly defined, says sociologist Ashis Nandy.

ASHIS NANDY: Though we call Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism religions, in South Asia and, I would suspect, even in East Asia they were not religions in the Western sense. There is no word in any Indian language which is a synonym of religion.

DE SAM LAZARO: Instead, Nandy says religious practice is localized and individualized in India, particularly in the predominant Hinduism, which has no centralized leadership. Hindus profess faith in one creator, Brahma, as part of a trinity with Vishnu, the protector, and Shiva, the destroyer of evil, shown in this Aastha channel animation. They are manifest in countless deities and forms. People can and often do choose a personal god or gods informed by family or village traditions, personal experience, or even word of mouth. The pantheon can sometimes transcend what to Westerners might seem firmly drawn lines between religious faiths.

NANDY: A friend of mine did a survey. According to census, only one percent of the citizens of Chennai are Christian. He asked them who is your personal god, and 10 percent said Jesus Christ was their personal god—one percent Christian; 10 percent have Jesus Christ as their personal god. They don’t see any contradiction, and that’s the way religion is.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gradually, he says, technology—mostly the Internet and television—may help forge a sharper sense of religious identity.

NANDY: Traditionally, the South Asian faiths depended not on belief systems like modern Christianity does, but on religious practices. What you did was important, not what you believed. Nobody asked you do you really believe in Krishna, do you really believe in Ram? I suspect that, like the channel Aastha, the modern versions of faith will gradually begin to make inroads into the culture of religion in this society.

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in the Gupta household, the religion channels are on regularly, though only one member, the matriarch, pays much attention to what for her is a service that brings the temple and age-old traditions into her home.

SHEELA RANI GUPTA (through translator): We have a deal. There are certain times I will watch my religious programs. When they’re over, they are relieved. Now they can have the TV.

DE SAM LAZARO: Her granddaughters, Siddhi and Riddhi Gupta, however, will have little to do with channels like Aastha.

(speaking to the Gupta daughters): Do you ever watch any of the religion channels, either of you?

SIDDHI GUPTA: No.

DE SAM LAZARO: Why not?

SIDDHI GUPTA: At times it’s okay watching religion. I’m not a very TV watcher. I just watch English movies, and that’s also really rare.

DE SAM LAZARO: For their part, parents Deepak and Bhavana Gupta may worry about children arguing too much, about unhealthy outside influences. Yet they also enjoy the upside—a new intellectual engagement with their two teenage daughters. One example: The children question the Hindu practice of paying priests to perform prayer services for their intentions, akin to a Roman Catholic tradition of paying a priest to say masses.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): They’re more practical in their approach.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): We think: we’re going to the temple, let’s give the priest 500 rupees to have him do a good prayer service for us. Now the younger generation, they ask, why?

SIDDHI GUPTA: I don’t think that’s the way to show God that you believe in him. God doesn’t want us to give money. He actually wants us to do something. Why don’t we give that money to charity and stuff? There are millions of programs, NGOs going on to save child labor.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): Sometimes I really feel proud with my elder daughter. I know in myself she is right.

DE SAM LAZARO: There may be clashes over material goods and acquisitions like all middle-class teenagers have with parents. But this family sees no clash between modernity and Hinduism which, they say, is inherently eclectic and tolerant. The next generation won’t abandon Hindu traditions, they say, but rather tailor them to meet their own individual needs.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in New Delhi.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/01/thumb-hinduism.jpgBhavana Gupta says her generation will go to a Hindu temple in New Delhi and say, “Let’s give the priest 500 rupees to have him do a good prayer service for us.” But the younger generation questions this traditional Hindu practice and asks why.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/01/22/january-22-2010-hinduism-and-modern-india/5510/feed/6Ashis Nandy,Hindu,Hinduism,India,middle class,modern,modernity,New Delhi,puja,Religion,religious,spiritualBhavana Gupta says her generation will go to a Hindu temple in New Delhi and say, "Let's give the priest 500 rupees to have him do a good prayer service for us." But the younger generation questions this traditional Hindu practice and asks why.Bhavana Gupta says her generation will go to a Hindu temple in New Delhi and say, "Let's give the priest 500 rupees to have him do a good prayer service for us." But the younger generation questions this traditional Hindu practice and asks why.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno8:37 Michael Walzer Extended Interviewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2009/04/03/april-3-2009-michael-walzer-extended-interview/8581/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2009/04/03/april-3-2009-michael-walzer-extended-interview/8581/#commentsFri, 03 Apr 2009 13:50:49 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=8581More →

]]>Watch an extended video of our interview with philosopher and author Michael Walzer, who explains the story of the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Watch an extended video of our interview with philosopher and author Michael Walzer, who explains the story of the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt./wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/04/thumb01-walzerextra.jpg